Hanging Woman Creek (1964)

by L'amour, Louis

  Standing there in the cave, I tried to figure out where the two might be, but I could not. They were somewhere out there in the snow, a girl and a wounded man, perhaps even a dying one. And there was nothing I could do. To wander aimlessly about in the snow would do nothing but wear out my horse, and my chances of stumbling upon them were slight. Not knowing that I was hunting for them, they would have every reason to hide. Perhaps they would hide even from me.

  I tore a sheet from my tally book and wrote a note, brief and to the point:

  You can always come to me, no matter what.

  What to sign it? This cave might be found by others, might even have been supplied by someone else. Whatever it was signed, it must be something Philo would understand, and perhaps Ann would grasp too. So I signed it Brennan on the Moor.

  That was the name of an old Irish folk song that Philo was often singing and which I’d asked him to sing a couple of times to me. He would make the connection at once, I was sure. And on our ride out from Miles City I had talked to Ann about the song, and about the highwayman about whom it was written.

  Leaving the note where I could be quickly seen, I went outside, took a last look around, and walked my horse away, brushing out what tracks we left, knowing the snow would obliterate them that much the faster.

  It was a long, cold ride back to the line camp. There were strange horses in the corral when I got there. I swung down and, rifle in hand, walked up to the door.

  Eddie Holt sat inside, his back against the wall. He had a six-shooter belted on—the first time I’d seen him wear one—and his Winchester in his hands.

  When I stepped into the room I found myself facing Bill Justin and three of his hands. All of them were men I knew, all of them men with whom I’d worked. But there was no friendliness in their faces, none at all.

  “Hello, Mr. Justin,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting you out here in this weather.”

  He shifted his position uneasily. “Pike, I’m going to have to let you go. Windy and Nebraska are going to take over.”

  “Mind giving me a reason?”

  Justin hesitated. “There’s been talk. You were seen driving cattle down into Wyoming.”

  “Whoever told you that,” I said, “should have looked into it. They were your cattle. I trailed rustlers down there, and Eddie and me, we took them away from the rustlers, set them afoot, and came back here.”

  Justin looked uncomfortable, and then Nebraska spoke up. “You were mighty friendly with Tom Gatty,” he said, “and we found tracks of his horse close by.”

  “He was a friend of mine. He did come here. He came here after a bottle of patent medicine. You know Tom … he’s always dying.”

  Nobody said anything to that, so I said to Eddie, “All right, get packed. We’re riding out of here.” I glanced at Bill Justin. “Or do you want us to walk?”

  Justin’s face turned red. “No need to get nasty about it. Ride the horses and be damned.”

  “Mr. Justin,” I said, and I spoke very carefully, “I want you to hear this clear, and the rest of you, too. And I want it told to the rest of the outfit. I never stole a cow in my life, and you damned well know it. I worked for the brand always, and worked hard for you.

  “Now get this. I take it you are not calling us thieves. You’ve only hinted at it. Well, I’m laying it on the line. If you, or anybody else, takes it on themselves to name me as a thief, you’d better go armed from there on in. I’m no gunflghter, and you all know it, but if one word is said to point me as a thief, I’ll kill the man who said it, and every man who repeats it, as long as I last. Every damn one of you knows I never quit in my life, and you know I mean what I say.”

  Not one of them opened his mouth, and it was wise, for I was getting madder by the minute. Eddie, he got up and started putting our outfits together, but I never took my eyes off the men.

  Then, because I felt sorry for Bill Justin, I said to him: “And something else. If you’re tied in with Bohlen you’d better get shut of him and his vigilantes. They’ve attacked, maybe killed Philo Parley and his sister, and all hell is going to break loose.”

  “His sister?” Justin looked startled, shocked.

  “I brought her out here … remember?”

  Justin seemed frightened, and he started to bluster. “Parley was nothing but a damned nester … a cow thief. He—”

  “Mr. Justin,” I said, “Philo Parley was a former officer in the British Army. He belongs to one of the finest families in Great Britain. Philo Parley, in his own right, had money enough to buy you and sell you and never notice the difference. He’d no need to steal cows, or desire to. He just liked this country and the life here.

  “Half the cattlemen and the money behind the others down in Wyoming are friends of his. Believe me, when this gets out the country won’t be big enough to hold Bohlen and those tied in with him!”

  Justin’s face was dead white as I finished. Uneasy before, he was really scared now. He was never a bad man, but weak around Bohlen’s bluster and power. I really was sorry for him, but I was glad I was through with him.

  Windy came outside with us as we saddled up. I’d turned the roan into the corral and was taking that line-backed dun. The roan was used up, and the line-back was a good, tough horse.

  “That true, what you said in there?” Windy asked.

  “Sure.”

  He was silent for a couple of minutes, but as we stepped into our saddles, he said, “Pronto, if that’s true, you’d better run and you’d better hide.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Why, you damned, bull-headed fool,” he said softly, for Windy had always been a friendly man, “if that’s true Bohlen will be hunting you. You’ll be the only person who knew for sure about that sister of Parley’s, and you’ll be the only one who could point a finger at him. Pronto, if what you say is true, Roman Bohlen has got to kill you!”

  Funny thing … he was right, and I’d never given it a thought. Not that way.

  Frow now on, Bohlen would be hunting me. Not rustlers, not Parley, not anybody else but me. After that, if Parley wasn’t dead, he would have to kill him and hide the body.

  And that meant he would have to kill Ann, too.

  Chapter Twelve.

  It was night and it was cold, and we had no more home than a busted poker chip. There at the end Bill Justin had got all upset and insisted we didn’t have to leave at night, with it getting colder by the minute, but I had my neck bowed and would rather freeze to death than spend another night in that cabin.

  It was worth leaving to see their faces when Eddie dumped all that bear sign into an empty burlap sack. Why, their faces were longer than a mule mare’s, and Nebraska he almost reached for one of them, but Eddie picked up the meat cleaver.

  “You go ahead, Mister Cowpuncher. You just pick that up and you’ll find yourself liftin’ a stub. You’ll leave your hand right there on the table.”

  Nebraska was an ornery man, but he looked up at Eddie Holt and then at that cleaver and he was in no mind to take the chance. So we gathered up our things and lit out.

  The snow crunched under our boots as we walked over to saddle up, but it wasn’t until we were riding out that Eddie said, “You got a place to go? I mean, you got something in mind?”

  First thing I thought of was that cave. There was grub there, shelter, and firewood, and there was a creek only a whoop and a holler down the canyon.

  When we rode out from the place the snow was a good twelve inches deep on the level. Here and there where it could drift it was three or four times that deep, and no sign of easing off. All we needed now was a wind and we’d have a first-class blizzard. And unless a man has seen a blizzard in Montana or Dakota he hasn’t seen anything.

  Me, I was wearing a pair of wore-out shotgun chaps and I envied Eddie, who had him a pair of woolly chaps left over from his days with the Buffalo Bill Show. Not that others didn’t wear them. A good many Montana cowhands went in for woolly or angora chaps for win
ter riding, but they’d always seemed a mite too fancy for me.

  With my coat turned up around my ears and my hat tied down under my chin with a scarf, I surely didn’t look the romantic picture folks have of a Montana cowhand, but I wasn’t thinking of looks. I was thinking of that cave and wondering what Ann Parley was doing now—if she was alive.

  My face grew stiff from the cold and my ringers were numb, even though I changed hands on the bridle to beat them in turn against my legs. Several times we got down and walked to keep our feet from freezing.

  One satisfaction I had to keep me warm. Before leaving I had outlined the work we’d done to Justin and the men who were taking over from us, told them where we’d chopped holes in the ice, where the feed had been best, where the stock had taken to holing up in bad weather to get out of the wind, and generally giving them the layout.

  “You did a lot of work,” Justin had admitted grudgingly.

  “Oh, sure!” I told him sarcastically. “Rustling cows doesn’t take much time!”

  A couple of times when we were standing in the shelter of trees, I studied the stars, not wanting to go too far north. The landmarks all looked different under the snow. It was shading toward daylight when we finally scrambled into the canyon near Horse Creek Buttes and found the cave. It was empty.

  We led our horses just inside the entrance. There the passage narrowed down, too small for a horse to go through, but it widened out beyond that point. There was shelter from the wind if not from the cold.

  Inside, where there was a crack in the rock that was black from old fires, we built our own fire, and we made our beds on the cave floor, using the dried leaves and grass that someone—Philo, I believed—had prepared.

  Neither of us felt like talking, and we weren’t hungry, so after a cup of coffee to warm us up, we turned in, rolling up in our blankets.

  A startled movement from one of the horses woke me. The coals glowed a deep red, so the fire could not long have burned down. Eddie was sleeping quietly … I could hear his steady breathing. And I could hear the restlessness of the horses. Something was out there … something that bothered them.

  One hand reached out and grasped my Winchester, and then I eased up from my warm bed, and in my socks, I went through the passage. Very gently I put a hand on the shoulder of the nearest horse.

  I worked my way carefully along and spoke softly in his ear. Then I went under his neck, under the neck of the next horse, and stood in the opening of the cave, looking out on the white expanse of the snow.

  As I looked, something flopped in the snow, lunged a couple of paces, then flopped again. There was a muffled groan … then silence. For a long minute, I waited. There was no further sound, no movement, but something was out there, something that must be a man.

  Putting my Winchester down, I stepped out into the snow. In two swift strides I was beside him. Bending over, I caught him by the collar and rolled him over on his back. The face was indistinguishable in the vague reflected light of the snow. Taking him by the collar, I dragged him to the shelter of the cave’s mouth, then through the passage.

  As I filled the passageway a handful of grass suddenly hit the fire, and I heard a gun hammer click back. “Is that you, Pike?” Eddie’s voice said.

  “It’s me,” I answered. “I found something.”

  Eddie added fuel to the fire and when it blazed up, we stared down into the face of the injured man. It was Shorty Cones.

  While Eddie built up the fire, I peeled back Shorty’s clothes to see what was wrong. He had been shot twice in the back, and the two bullet holes were not two inches apart. The inside of his clothing was stiff with frozen blood, and of one thing I was sure. Only the cold had saved his life by causing the blood to coagulate, but I wasn’t giving him much chance.

  Eddie put his hand on my shoulder. “Pronto, you leave him to me. I helped doctor more than one hurt man.”

  Frankly, I was glad. Nobody was more scared than me when it came to tackling a thing like that. I had never had much to do with more than the sprains and bruises, and the occasional breaks a man can get on the range, but right off I could see that Eddie knew what he was about. Long before he’d gone to work for the Buffalo Bill Show he had been driving for a country doctor and had picked up a lot, helping him in a lot of ways.

  So I made coffee and kept the fire going. And I dug out a bottle I had stashed away. Neither Eddie nor me was much on the liquor, and whiskey can be death to a man who’s out on a cold night. A man full of whiskey will freeze to death faster than a sober man, for the liquor brings a temporary warmth, brings the heat to the surface of the skin, where it disappears into the cold air, leaving him colder than before. On the other hand, a man who has come in out of the cold can take a drink to warm himself up—if he isn’t going out again.

  After a few minutes Shorty began to mutter, and then his eyes opened. He looked up at Eddie, stared at him for several minutes, then turned his head and looked at me.

  “Hello, Shorty,” I said. “You just lie quiet. I’m making some coffee.”

  He seemed to relax, staring up into the darkness near the cave’s roof where the firelight nickered, then his eyes closed. After a moment, they opened again. “You find my horse?” he asked, speaking with surprising loudness.

  “No. I’ll go look.” I tugged my boots on over my wet socks. “Shorty … who shot you?”

  He looked puzzled. “Shot? I’m shot?” His brow puckered in a frown and his lips seemed to feel of the words before he spoke them. “I thought … something hit me … something … I don’t know.”

  Eddie took up the bottle and touched it to Shorty’s lips. “This here’s whiskey.”

  I stood up, stamping my feet solid into my boots, and shrugging into my coat. It was bitterly cold out there, and now the wind was blowing hard. In a way I was glad of it, for any tracks we or Shorty had left would be covered. No chance for Roman Bohlen, or anybody else, to find us.

  Not fifty yards from where I’d found Shorty, his horse was standing with reins trailing. Evidently he had fallen from the saddle, or had fallen after he dismounted to find the cave. For it seemed obvious that he had known of it. It began to seem as if almost everybody knew of this cave.

  Gathering up the reins, I led the horse to the cave mouth, then brushed off the snow. Shorty had his eyes closed when I came in, packing his saddle. Eddie looked up at me.

  “He talks wild now. Said something about meeting somebody … then about some shooting at the Tower.”

  “He must mean Devil’s Tower. It’s down in the Bear Lodge Mountains or near them.” Had Bohlen been down there, I wondered.

  Leaning over him, I said, “Shorty, was Bohlen down there?”

  “No.” came the answer.

  His eyes opened, and there for a minute or two he looked right into mine, as sane as I was myself. Then he turned his head and looked around, wonderingly.

  “Pike,” he said, “I made it, didn’t I? I made the cave.”

  “Did you stock this place? With grub and firewood?”

  “Hell, no!” He looked at me oddly. “How’d you know of this place? This is old Clyde Drum’s hideout.”

  Clyde Drum! Why, I hadn’t heard the name in years, or thought about him.

  “Did you know him?” I said.

  “Chin Baker did … and he’s got family around. Chin knew something about them. We hid out here once … so when I had to run … I came for this place.”

  He seemed to be finding it hard to talk.

  “Why did you run?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer for a moment, then he said, “Hell, Pike, the lot of us … they wiped us out. Just came out of nowhere and wiped us out … never seen any of them before.”

  Eddie came up, shaking his head at me. “I got you some soup, boy.”

  “Did they shoot you?”

  “I’m shot?” he said again in that puzzled way. “I thought somebody hit me from behind, but there was nobody around except—”

&nb
sp; But he didn’t finish. Shorty wasn’t going to need that soup.

  Eddie slowly turned around and went back to the fire and put the bowl of soup down. Shorty Cones had died right while we talked to him, right in the middle of a sentence.

  Nobody around except … who?

  Somebody had shot Shorty Cones in the back, shot him at close range, somebody he knew but did not fear. It had been just the same with Johnny Ward.

  And the Gatty outfit had been wiped out. Did that mean they had killed Tom too?

  And who were they?

  Discouragement and depression settled on me. Suddenly all I wanted in the world was to be out of here. Right then if I had been close to a railroad I would have caught me an armful of boxcars and left out of there. I’d have headed south to get away from the snow, and punched cows along the Mexican border the rest of my days.

  I’d come here to spend a quiet winter caring for Justin cows, and I’d wound up getting fired from my job, accused of rustling cattle I’d ridden miles to save; and now a man I’d tried to help was dead, and the whole Gatty gang gone. Strangers were riding over the country killing folks without anybody knowing who they were, or even that it happened.

  That was the thing that troubled me. It was all pretty sly … if we hadn’t come upon Shorty Cones before he died it might have been months, even years, before anybody knew anything at all about the Gatty gang being wiped out.

  So what happened to that herd of cattle they had hid back in the hills? Right then I made a wild guess, and as soon as I made it I told myself it was true, even though a damned fool idea it was.

  Eddie handed me a bowl of soup, and he ate the bowl he’d poured for Shorty. Neither of us looked at him.

  “Eddie, we’re going to leave out of here,” I said. “We’ll ride into Miles City or somewhere and catch us a train.”

  “All right.”